Plastic Optical Fiber (POF) is gaining popularity in avionic lower bandwidth (10-50 mbps) networks since plastic-optical fibers are low cost, light weight, and easy to install and to maintain. POF has inherently higher loss than glass fibers so the link budget is an important factor in the acceptance of POF into aircraft. A Passive Optical Hub (POH) would be an ideal component to enable plastic-optical fiber in a conventional bus network. However, unlike the copper data bus, the currently available passive optical hubs suffer loss that limits the network size (e.g., the number of nodes) and the distance covered by the hub. Current bus network passive optical hub designs incorporate either a mirror or a return loop. Both the mirror and return loop suffer from return loss, reflectivity losses, dispersion, and uniformity losses.
For the reasons stated above and for other reasons stated below which will become apparent to those skilled in the art upon reading and understanding the specification, there is a need in the art for improved passive optical hubs.